Phantom Navigator: Stealthy and Precise Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Redirection with Real-Time Tracking and GPS Spoofing

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26011v1
• Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:53:54 GMT
• Title: Phantom Navigator: Stealthy and Precise Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Redirection with Real-Time Tracking and GPS Spoofing
• Abstract summary: Phantom Navigator is a UAV redirection attack to mislead drones to a designated spoofing target, covertly and precisely.<n>Based on this approach, we build a physical attack platform equipped with a LiDAR--camera detection, tracking, and spoofing stack.<n>We demonstrate the effectiveness of our redirection methodology and the attack implementation in real-world case studies.
• Score: 10.795766879813074
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Redirecting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from their intended mission trajectories has been an active area of research. However, existing UAV redirection attacks lack reliability, precision, and covertness for a targeted diversion. They primarily rely on physical capture, communication hijacking, or sensor spoofing. Yet, physical interception is costly, offers only a single opportunity for success, and poses a high risk of collateral damage; network-based attacks demand deep technical expertise and access to encrypted communication channels; and sensor spoofing techniques typically fall short in achieving the accuracy and robustness required to steer a UAV toward a specified target. Consequently, we propose Phantom Navigator, a UAV redirection attack to mislead drones to a designated spoofing target, covertly and precisely. Our approach combines offline pre-redirection reachability analysis, which provides high-fidelity estimates of achievable redirect ranges, with an online closed-loop, stealthy execution layer that ensures successful redirection in practice. Based on this approach, we build a physical attack platform equipped with a LiDAR--camera detection, tracking, and spoofing stack that performs real-time identification, pose estimation, and computation of targeted spoofing signals to covertly and accurately redirect victim UAVs to a designated location. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our redirection methodology and the attack implementation in real-world case studies.

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